<p>Hey I'm an incoming freshman to Tufts, and I was wondering if anyone could give me advice on how to choose classes freshman year. I am majoring in biology and want to enter medical school? Any tips on what classes/ professors I should try to take?</p>
<p>Your advisor and orientation leaders should give you some great personal guidance on that. If I remember correctly, the early pre-med courses are pretty set for what you need to take, but I'm a humanities major who doesn't know about that stuff. </p>
<p>I'd say pick five classes and leave room to drop one. Freshmen have like forever to drop classes so if one's not working out drop it. Five classes can be a lot but that lets you see what you like, and if it turns out right you can just finish with all five credits.</p>
<p>I totally agree with Jumbosox about signing up for five, leaving room to drop one. I think freshman can still drop classes, like, after midterms. It's something really absurd like that. And yes, your orientation leaders and advisors have actually been trained to help you pick your schedule and courses.</p>
<p>If you're premed, you probably don't have as much choice as far as PROFESSORS, because you'll probably be taking intro science classes, which are relatively large (for Tufts) and only have one lecturer, though you'll have a teaching assistant to help you out during smaller recitations. And I'm sorry to say this, but the intro sciences are often set in the earliest blocks of the day.</p>
<p>I think usually the premed kids will take, say, two sciences, a math/language, and then fill a random requirement with some elective, or use their elective to catch up on the big language requirement. It makes sense to take four courses for the premed kids because the science courses all come with weekly recitations (1 hour) and labs (up to 3 hours), and you have to study for exams and do prelabs and labs, which require a healthy amount of work. </p>
<p>So your orientations leaders will hopefully set you on track with which classes you'll need to take to complete your bio major. You can also start thinking about what classes you'll want to take to fill distribution and foundation requirements, and whether or not you have any AP scores that place you out of these requirements. Distribs require 2 maths, 2 sciences, 2 fine arts, 2 humanities and 2 social sciences. Foundations are 2 semesters of college writing (AP English 5 exempts you from both, a 4 exempts you from 1), world civ (a class about a non-Western civilization), foreign language.</p>
<p>You'll be able to log into SIS Online and see which classes are open once you get to Tufts, and then you can look up the professors and ask around and see who seems better-received. If you're really curious, check out this site: <a href="http://ase.tufts.edu/departments.aspx%5B/url%5D">http://ase.tufts.edu/departments.aspx</a> This site has a list of most of Tufts' departments, and if you click on them you can check out which courses they're offering this semester, with descriptions and the name of the professor teaching.</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p>You will, of course, be taking some classes that aren't intro science classes. </p>
<p>A good starting point is <a href="http://tufts.jumboaccess.com/%5B/url%5D">http://tufts.jumboaccess.com/</a></p>
<p>A fair number of reviews of professors are there. But don't limit yourself to just that, ask around, since the JumboAccess site is far from complete.</p>